


A Kind of Memory

by annaslastdalliance



Series: That terrible gaslighting AU [3]
Category: Frozen (2013)
Genre: (sort of), Ableism, Badly-researched swordfighting, Bleak AUs, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, F/M, Forced Marriage, Gaslighting, I cannot warn people away from it enough, Illusory love, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, Literally this is 'staying with your abuser: the fic series', Minor Violence, More like: what happens when you can't unlearn the charade?, My head is a terrible place, Seriously this fic has everything that is terrible, Sexism, Swordfighting, What happens when the pretence becomes real through repetition?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-23
Updated: 2016-05-23
Packaged: 2018-06-10 08:15:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6947152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/annaslastdalliance/pseuds/annaslastdalliance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Now, when she calls him <em>love</em>, she is no longer acting in self-defence.</p>
<p>(Hans tries denial, Anna tries catharsis, and they both try to pretend 365 days worth of play-acted marriage never happened.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Kind of Memory

**Author's Note:**

> My research game is notoriously weak, so please excuse the usual array of factual/historical/logical errors and idiocies. Also, the emotional abuse and gaslighting is strong with this one, as is the sexism and patriarchal garbage. Also some ableist slurs and violence. Hans is an awful manipulative asshole, basically, and this fic is the posterchild for abusive relationship Hanna fic that makes half of fandom so jumpy. 
> 
> TL;DR: heed the warnings, please! (There’s a continuation of this in the works where Anna gets some more agency/power/happiness but this fic is Not It.)

> "We were living, as it were, on a kind of memory of the heart, sufficiently powerful that the thoughtful of separation was painful, but too feeble for us to find happiness in being together." - _Adolphe_ , Benjamin Constant

It's been three long weeks since Anna fell asleep on Hans's chest avowing him a murderer, and he's not shared a bed with her since.

At first, his painstaking distance had amused her. There had been something unavoidably ridiculous in seeing him flinch from her hand, as though the touch he had once used to warm him might now burn him instead. More recently, however, she's begun to find it strangely disappointing, his retreat robbing her of some catharsis she didn't know she still hoped for. She hasn’t set this in motion for vindication—vengeance an urge she hasn't felt since she last watched his shirt-sleeves float above her head and thought to strangle him with them—so it surprises her to find it now, curled inside the anxiety of his distance, as though she expected something more to come of showing her hand.

It’s not that Hans has been less gentle with her than usual, in private as in public. But there has been something more rigorous in the performance of late, practised rather than unthinking. Previously, gentleness had been incidental, a choice Hans preferred if left open to him—but now it is a deliberate strategy, as precise and calculated as his chivalry. And though his dotage had once made her skin crawl, now it’s the perfect flatness of his voice that does the same; the deadness in his eyes as he levels them with hers that sets her blood to boiling.

“Anna?”

“Did I wake you, love?”

It’s a term of endearment she’s taken to ever since it first made him flinch in her arms, and once again, Hans does not disappoint. At first, she’d meant it as a warning: a reminder of the thing he’d wrought between them, which God had witnessed and only blood could unmake. After all, Anna knows well enough, by now, the cost of blood discreetly shed, and her price is too high for Hans to pay, least of all without an explicit threat. And while Anna is careful not to present one—careful in the same way she’d learnt to hold her breath beneath water and her body still when he kissed her—now, when she calls him _love_ , she is no longer acting in self-defence.

“It’s the middle of the night, Anna.”

Still dressed in his bedclothes, eyes widened with sleep, Hans almost looks innocent as he blinks at her. Then he notices what she’s holding, and she sees the moment as it happens; the wariness that she used to take for coyness stealing slowly across his face. His hand twitches at his side, once, threatening, before he forces it still.

“What are you doing?”

In return, Anna offers back her own version of self-control: crafted domestic sweetness.

“I’m sorry, Hans; I hope I didn’t wake you, only, I had a dream that you _finally_ agreed to teach me…and I got so excited I just had to come down here and look at them!”

She extends her wrist innocently to show him exactly what she means, and while Hans doesn’t exactly step back, she hears his breath hitch as his eyes dart down to track her sword tip.

“You promised you would, remember?”

“Of course.” There’s no disguising it anymore, not with the point of her sword held towards him: the blank automaticity of his words. It’s as though he’s speaking to some invisible third party, someone standing just outside the room, listening. “But that’s not a practice sword, Anna. Are you sure the early hours of the morning are the best time for this…experiment? Come back to bed, dear, and we’ll talk about it in the morning.”

Back to bed? With difficulty, Anna bites back a scoff: hers, or his?

“No,” she says instead, and only just remembers to make it a whine at the very end of the syllable. “Come on, Hans, _please_ , just one lesson, something small…I won’t get back to sleep otherwise, I’m _much_ too excited now, I just know it—”

Something other than wariness and calculation flutters briefly, uncomfortably, over the flatness of Hans’s face. Annoyance. He’s _annoyed_. The sight fills Anna with hope, and she steps forward, accidentally-deliberately butting the flat of her blade against his dressing gown.

“Oh—!”

Instinctively, Hans steps back, and when his eyes meet hers again, it is with something more a precursor to violence than an imitation of composure. Anna laughs, forgetting herself in the rush of his unintentional honesty.

“See? This is why you have to teach me!”

“Fine,” Hans says, grimly, and Anna hasn’t the time for surprise before he’s plucked the sword from her grip with a twist to the wrist that smarts just little enough to be incidental. “If it will stop you asking.”

For a moment they simply glare at each other, lines forgotten, derailed by proximity.

“I could be wrong, but I _think_ I’ll need a sword, too…”

“Of course,” Hans says, ignoring her sarcasm, and the bubble bursts; he steps around her neatly to survey the untidy pile of weapons she’d rifled through earlier. “But not that one, if you don’t mind; it was one of my father’s.”

“You _hate_ your father.”

“That doesn’t mean I don’t respect his possessions.” The rebuke is only slightly cool; no different, really, to the tone of his voice that one time she’d spilt ink all over one of the maps he’d been tracing. “Here, this one will do.”

Anna stares at the ornate sword hilt, one of her discards from earlier, and bites down on sudden rage.

“That’s a child’s toy.”

“And as far as sword-fighting is concerned, Anna, that’s not an inaccurate assessment.” When she still makes no move to take it, a sigh of genuine asperity shakes itself from Hans’s throat, and he closes his eyes for a moment in obvious frustration. The sight placates her somehow: no less innocent, but closer to the truth than his noble tolerance. Anna extends her hand and lets him place the hilt into her fingers.

“It’s not intended as a slight, dear. I just don’t want you to wear yourself out merely _lifting_ the thing, before we can even get to using it.”

“Of course,” Anna answers, automatically. “I’m not completely clueless, you know; my father taught me plenty, before—” She breaks off, distracting herself from the phrase’s conclusion by turning her blade over in her grip. “I’m just—rusty. I need you to remind me how to—”

“Stand?” Hans supplies, and smiles fleetingly at her reaction. “What’s the matter, Anna, not quite the adventure you were after?”

Hans has teased her like this before, on her good days, and not for the first time, Anna wonders what he makes of the days since. In fairness, she’s not sure how she classes them herself; her world, once much simpler, no longer seems to divide so easily. After all, she has had her moments, unwitnessed, since the veil was lifted; sobbing in her bath for hours while her maidservant begged to fetch him. Keeping Hans away had felt like splitting open her own skin, but it had seemed important, at the time, to surface from the water without his grip. Now, Anna stares down at her feet, forcing past the memory painfully.

“What’s wrong with how I’m standing?”

“Nothing at all, if you plan to remain perfectly still throughout our bout. I wouldn’t recommend it, however. Here—” He nudges carefully at her inner ankle with the flat of his father’s sword. “To begin with, you might move your feet slightly further apart.”

The cold at the point of contact between her bared ankle and his blade lingers like a brand. Does Hans mean to intimidate her? Or does he simply not realize that this is the first time he’s touched her since Elsa’s anniversary? It’s the latter she would find most damning, but the gesture is so deliberate that intimidation seems more likely— _intimidation_ , as though she has threatened Hans with anything but the most passive of hatreds. Perhaps even that feels like revenge, to him. Perhaps, in the midst of his storybook ending, a knowing victim must seem like violence.

“Good,” Hans says, and Anna surfaces to find she’s shuffled her feet apart quite obediently. “You’ll want to bend your elbows, too, when you attack—”

“I know that,” Anna snaps, and swings her sword to show him just how well. It meets Hans’s own in a jolt that she feels all the way to her jaw, and she almost drops it. Opposite her, Hans laughs suddenly, breathily, surprised rather than angry.

“For heaven’s sake, Anna.” He lowers his sword arm and arranges his features into something more disapproving. “You must take this seriously—perhaps I’d best fetch us proper practice swords—”

“No,” Anna says, and this time, she forgets to elongate the syllable as she angles her blade in the light. It may be decorative, and a little short, but it’s still more than sharp enough to draw blood. “No, I’d much rather use this.”

Hans’s smile is now more strained than indulgent. “Anna, please. I can trust you to be sporting, can’t I?”

“ _Sporting_?” Anna echoes, incredulously, and suddenly she can no longer keep up the pretence. “Were you _sporting_ when you used one of these things to remove my sister’s head?”

Her blade slices forward again, almost instinctively, and strikes the ground between them with a sharp, high-pitched skittering. The sound lingers into the silence that follows.

“I was wondering what this was about,” Hans says, eventually, and it’s almost musical to hear him, finally, with so little veneer. The sword’s second sweep seems to have cut through something in the air between them; some invisible curtain Anna thought they’d already dispensed with, but which has proven surprisingly resilient. Marriage, she thinks, or some rose-coloured memory of it; the ceremony, and vows she’d meant in the swearing. If Hans is having the same difficulty, there is nothing on his face to show it.

“Still. I didn’t think you’d be sufficiently foolish—”

Anna swings her blade again, so wildly Hans doesn’t even falter in speaking as he side-steps it.

“— _clearly_ , however, I’ve overestimated your intelligence. Call it marital attachment; a mistake I don’t intend on repeating.” He pauses then to appraise her, unhurried and perfectly composed. “Now, before you raise that thing again, tell me, Anna—are you prepared to finish this? You certainly seem prepared enough to start it, but perhaps I’m mistaken there, too. Perhaps you’re merely feeling unwell again, and this is just a nightmare that you’re having.”

Fear should be her first response, but instead, Anna finds herself mostly surprised. This is not the first time she’s attempted to confront Hans with his crimes, but this is certainly the first time he’s offered to acknowledge them: here, _now_ , with her sword-tip held towards him. She can’t immediately decide if it’s bravery or cowardice, then settles on the latter: Hans has chosen the battleground he is most familiar with, where he feels surest to best her. The corollary comes as another surprise: does he not consider himself equally adept at deception and courtship, at winding Anna’s heart and lungs and throat around his deft, still-gloved fingers? She may not be much of a swordsman— _not completely clueless_ only just shy of an overstatement—but is she really a bigger threat in his _bed_ than armed across from him?

“I haven’t had a nightmare since I realized what you are, Hans.” It isn’t true, but he’s not to know it. “This one’s yours. My eyes are wide open.”

Hans smiles at that, coyly, and it’s a snake shedding its skin; a flat, self-serving thing, like a fire with no heat.

“Is that right? Let’s test that theory, shall we?”

Despite the warning, Anna barely sees his sword move in time to parry—but barely is all she needs. Adrenaline blooms sharp and sudden again in her chest, and she grips convulsively at the sword’s pommel, no longer in any danger of letting go.

“Good,” Hans says, a touch breathless in his own right, whether from surprise or effort she can’t tell. “Yes, you’ve clearly had some instruction before; though I must say I’m astonished you remember it so well. Your memory certainly leaves much to be desired in other areas.”

“Maybe I never had a very good teacher in _other areas_.”

“Maybe not, but rest assured, Anna, I will be more diligent with this lesson. Now, shall we see what else you remember?”

His second attack is a lunge, and Anna avoids it narrowly, pulling her body out of reach in a spasm of forgotten muscles. When she skitters to a halt, several lengths away from him, her sides are burning like a stitch and her right arm has begun to ache, forcing her to add her left hand to her grip.

“Tired already?” Hans asks, pityingly. “Of course, that’s to be expected, with your clumsy footwork. Didn’t I tell you to keep your feet further apart?”

Almost too late, Anna tears her gaze away from the triangle of her toes to scramble back from the blur of a blade in her periphery. It’s enough—just—and she lands on her backside unscathed, smarting mostly from her own stupidity. After everything, how could she have been so naïve as to expect Hans to fight her fairly? And yet, if he isn’t, it’s an odd sort of guile he’s practising, waiting patiently with his sword lowered as she regains her footing.

“Really, Anna, I’m surprised. And, I must confess…a little disappointed. After all the trouble you used to give me, I was almost looking forward to seeing what you had in mind next, but this seems somewhat simplistic, even for—”

Anna doesn’t feel her blade make contact; only knows it has because of Hans’s sudden grunt, coloured with more shock than pain.

"You're hurt,” she blurts compulsively, as much apologetic as victorious, and Hans is silent for a long moment before answering, probing warily at his shoulder from the hastily-reclaimed distance between them. Watching, Anna is suddenly struck by a vision of last autumn: Hans in bed, sneezing; Anna sprawled beside him, half-basking, half-tending. It had been rare, that September, to get his time and attention without interruption, and the long day at his side had felt like an unexpected gift. She still remembers watching his skin change colour in that oncoming evening, the freckles of his nose and cheeks turning gold in the dawn light, his unshaved stubble a deep auburn. Now, standing opposite in the dimming firelight, his face is half-shadow; his hair liquid black.

"Not quite. But you have ruined my dressing gown.”

In all honesty, Anna can’t even see the tear she’s made, but she knows that isn’t conclusive; not when her eyes won’t keep their focus.

“Good.” To her credit, her voice doesn’t tremble. “I’ll do worse next time, so you’d better—you’d better not come near me.”

It’s unlikely, and the quirk of Hans’s eyebrow as he steps closer again suggests he knows it.

“Had I better not? I’m sorry to disappoint you, Anna, but I haven’t exactly been…how shall I say it? _Putting my best foot forward._ But then, you haven’t been entirely honest with me either, have you, about your level of skill?”

He lunges towards her suddenly and Anna jerks back instinctively, not so much a dodge as a flinch away from danger. This feels different from Hans’s earlier attacks, smoother and less calculated, more of a dance than a performance. It is nothing she’s come to expect of him, watching him spar—all straight-backed discipline, more the soldier than the duellist. But now he is neither, and his footfall is heavy as he advances towards her, his blade reflected across the parquet in a single glow of white.

“Isn’t this what you wanted? A _lesson_?”

The line rings strangely false in the air between them, like a parody of a threat from a playacted villain, and Hans must hear it too, because he seems to falter slightly. An edge of curiosity and frustration creeps into his voice when he continues:

“What _were_ you expecting, Anna? What on earth did you hope might come of this? Did you think this would be cathartic? Or perhaps you were more ambitious; perhaps you thought that you might actually succeed in killing me?”

“No,” Anna protests, immediately. Kill him? The thought strikes her as ridiculous, the accusation bizarrely offensive. It is Hans’s job, to consider killing; she came here to fight, to wound, to throw her pain in his face and force him to see it and know it—but never to kill him. She has wished him gone, yes; absent, or stillborn, or otherwise scrubbed from her existence—but dead? Hans dead is nothing she has ever dreamt of, not since the first and last time she knotted her fingers across his throat as he slept.

“No?” Hans repeats, and her answer must surprise him, because he wavers again, frozen in his advance. “Then what _are_ you hoping to achieve?”

It’s a question she has asked herself before, but never before has the answer surfaced so quickly.

“I want you to admit it.”

Hans doesn’t blink. “I beg your pardon?”

“What you took from me,” Anna says, and then, after the beat of silence as he stares at her, “—and what you _are_.”

For a moment she thinks he still won’t answer, and when he does it almost seems he doesn’t mean to; frustration ebbing at his control like a bitten tongue.

“Very well, if it will make you happy. I admit it. Does that suffice? Can I return to bed, now?”

“Not to me. To them.” A pause, as wariness re-asserts itself over Hans’s face. “If you won’t, then I will.”

“They won't believe you, Anna. They never did.”

“They might. Are you really willing to risk it?”

For a moment, she sees him waver again; between the guarded ruler and the storybook villain, towards that person she recognizes better; the Hans who is harried and human, and capable of a cruelty only in the most abstract and casual of senses. A sinner, as compared to the Devil.

"I’m not concerned,” he says at last, with a semblance of calm, but a little heat is creeping back into his voice under the guise of firmness. “You won't be telling them anything.”

“And how are you going to stop me?" Anna laughs despite herself, shaky and high-pitched. "What can you _possibly_ do to me now, when you've already taken everything I care about?”

"You already know the answer to that question, I think.”                           

Ice baths and sleeping draughts; yes, she knows the answer. It forces fresh fear up her throat again, past her fury and over her vocal chords, and Hans seizes the opportunity.

"How much do you really remember of those first few months, Anna? You were quite pitiful, really—quite _beside yourself_ with grief. Any fool could see you couldn’t be held responsible for your behaviour, no matter how difficult it was proving, so when your attendants grew anxious at your slow recovery, _I_ was the one to call for patience. You needed time, I suggested. Kindness, a gentle hand.” For a moment, Hans looks lost in the memory of his own magnanimity, eyes gone distant, the line of his mouth softening. “Whatever your recollections, Anna, I tried to show you mercy.”

“Mercy,” Anna echoes, and then again, with mounting disbelief: “You call what you did _mercy_?”

Hans ignores her question, but something flickers over his face before he turns it away: a kind of unexpected discomfort.

“Frankly, I would much rather you didn’t force my hand in the matter. You must realize you’re much more valuable to me co-operative. After all, the people of Arendelle need their Queen; I would never suggest otherwise. But if you intend to stand here and threaten me with my own armoury…” He shrugs, as though she’s given him no option; or as though he expects her to believe this is an option he’d rather not take. “Well, then, I must confess; I’m no longer feeling particularly clement.”

“And here I thought you enjoyed it,” Anna says, beyond incredulity now and into the flatness of scorn. “Holding me under the surface with your sleeves rolled up."

“I never held you under,” Hans corrects, quickly.

“I guess not. You always did prefer getting others to do your dirty work.”

"Killing your sister was dirty work, wouldn’t you say? I did that much myself.”

Anna flinches, despite herself. He is citing Elsa to wound her, to even their footing; as though she has hurt him at all, as though her blows have even so much as _connected_ —

“Congratulations,” she retorts, with every ounce of venom she can summon. “Then it shouldn’t be too difficult to do again.”

There’s a silence in which Hans simply stares at her, as though he might be about to ask her to repeat herself.

“Are you asking me to kill you, Anna?” He sounds unexpectedly disgusted by the possibility. “Is _that_ your aim? Has life as Queen Consort truly proven so unbearable?”

It shouldn’t surprise her, really, to learn this is how he views her situation; not after everything he’s done. Perhaps he had even expected Anna to be grateful to him, in some small, guilty way, for paving her ascension to the throne. After all, had their positions been reversed, Hans would have been ecstatic to have one of his brothers murdered; and it’s this knowledge that guides her now to the exact words that will hurt him most.

“Queen Consort? Don’t you mean Queen _Regnant_?”

Hans’s face twists briefly into something ugly.

“In name only. After all, you wouldn’t want Arendelle left in the hands of a _madwoman_ , would you?”

No matter how often she hears it, it still makes her heart stumble; in retrospect, this is a game that Hans will always win. It doesn’t matter how well she has come to know, over the long year of their marriage, some of the chinks in his thick armour. Her skin will always split soonest.

“Even then—even then, you’re no more than my Regent. _Not_ my King.” Anna takes a slow, steadying breath; burrowing back towards her fury. “You’ll _never_ be Arendelle’s King—not while I’m still breathing.”

“Well, that has a simple enough remedy.”

It’s carelessly uttered; distracted, even, but it makes Anna’s breath stutter in a way Hans’s choreographed advance on her earlier could not approach. This is the real Hans; the Devil she knows and sleeps beside, with a passion for power and a documented history of willingness to do whatever it takes to get it.

“Is that—is that the idea?”

For a moment, he looks genuinely startled. “I thought we covered this, Anna. But if it would help to clarify, the idea, as far as I am concerned, is to get back to bed as soon as possible.” **  
**

“You know what I mean! This—fight. Or whatever it is. You could’ve just knocked me out, or dragged me back to my quarters, or shut me in the library again—” An unexpected bitterness creeps into her voice which she recognizes with a distant curiosity: “—after all, you know well enough by now that it’s quite sound-proof. But instead you gave me a sword, and space in which to swing it—why? Are you—are you hoping I’ll—”

Anna stops, dry-mouthed, and Hans’s incredulity cedes into an unexpectedly wolfish smile.

“Oh, I see. You’re not concerned I’ll kill you—you’re concerned I’ll make it seem an accident. Quite the martyr, aren’t you? A shame you _weren’t_ the elder sister. But believe me, Anna, if I were really trying to dispose of you, I would hardly select this avenue. As I’m sure you can appreciate, it’s considerably harder to explain accidental death by exsanguination than by a long fall down the cellar steps.”

“Harder. But not impossible.”

“No. Not impossible. Especially given your tendency to mistake rotted bannisters for toboggans.”

For a moment they both pause, lost in the vision of this possible future, and then Hans shrugs as though to dispel it, the curve of his mouth oddly conciliatory.

“No, you can rest easy, Anna. I have absolutely no intention of killing you, now or in the future—no matter how tempting you make it.” The strange, wolfish smile re-asserts itself again lightly across his lips. “I’ve resisted the urge up till now, after all. Your righteous hatred can’t be any more insufferable than your clumsy affection— _or_ your deranged fury.”

His tone is lofty, but it doesn’t feel cruel; a statement of fact, rather than a blade for the twisting. In some ways, it is almost reassuring to have him call her bluff so baldly, and even better to hear him confess her hatred righteous. Because while Anna _does_ want him to kill her—loud and ugly and obviously murder—she also doesn’t want to die, and strangely, Hans seems to share the sentiment.

“Or did you truly think it was your prodigious swordsmanship, keeping me at bay?”

Relief makes Anna laugh, giddily. “Actually, I was thinking more beginner’s luck.”

“Yes,” Hans agrees, warmly, “that’s a much more likely candidate. Though of course, you’re not really a beginner, are you? Who is it that taught you, after your father’s death?”

“No one, really. Well—there was a girl I used to spar with, the daughter of our old guard captain—why am I telling you this?”

Hans smiles again, slight and soft, and Anna wonders if he knows it.

“Because I asked you, I imagine. Whatever else your manners leave to be desired, you’re always eager enough to _talk_ , in my experience. No?” Hans continues, wry but not malicious, when she doesn’t interject: “In any case, since we’ve established neither of us wishes to kill the other, why don’t we put these away?”

He tilts his sword carefully in the light to punctuate the question, and for the first time in what feels like hours, but can surely only be minutes, the two of them look towards it. It dangles loosely by Hans’s side like a strange extension of his limbs, deliberate and inoffensive, and Anna looks to her own weapon in turn, feeling its weight again in a sudden pulse of pain across her shoulders. It’s enough to burst the bubble.

“No. Not until you answer my question.”

Hans’s smile doesn’t falter, but his voice gives away the strain on his patience. “Which one is that?”

“Why are you doing this? _Humouring_ me? Pretending this is a fair fight, _asking_ me to put this sword down, like you couldn’t disarm me in a heartbeat? Are you hoping to—to _placate_ me? Hoping that I’ll turn back into that dumb, sweet thing that reached for your hand after every nightmare, as if you hadn’t caused it?”

“Perhaps,” Hans admits after a moment, halting. He’s looking at her blade, smile half-faded on his face, and he doesn’t raise his eyes as he continues. “What if that _were_ the reason? That I hoped you might find some release in our skirmish? That I missed your warmth by my side?”

At first, Anna can only blink at him, dumbfounded: _is this meant to be an offering_? Does he think she _wants_ to share a bed with him? Convulsively, Anna’s fingers tighten around her sword hilt, and she jerks her blade upright again, into the space between them. Opposite her, Hans actually flinches, and when he raises his own blade to mirror hers it is slow like an afterthought.

“I’d rather sleep beside a snake.”

Every last trace of the smile finally drops away.

“Is that so?” The odd, feigned warmth that had been building up between them suddenly seems like a distant memory. “And yet, I seem to remember a fair few occasions where you seemed willing enough.”

Heat rushes into her cheeks. “I’m a very good actress.”

“You’re an extremely poor one, actually—when it comes to deceiving _others_ , at least.”

“What—what is that supposed to mean?”

The steel of his eyes should prepare her for what comes next, but it doesn’t.

“Simply that while you may _like_ to believe me the villain of this piece, Anna, I did not deceive you one tenth as much as you deceived yourself. Even after I murdered your sister before your eyes, it was still _so easy_ to convince you I was prince charming. What—did you expect me to correct you? When your delusion was so clearly to my advantage? And, for that matter, to _yours_?”

It is like having all the air removed from her body; somehow, in the space of five minutes, she’s forgotten the surgical cruelty of which he is capable, and it stuns her anew. She should be used to it, by now; not dissimilar to the way her memory creeps up on her in the mornings, when she remembers how she feels about him first, and what he’s done to her second. She should be used to it, but she isn’t, and it takes her a moment to find her tongue.

“To _mine_?”

He has the audacity to shrug. “Why not? Wasn’t there some happiness, too, in our marriage? Some peace to be found—some comfort, even, in the shelter of my arms?”

“The arms that had severed my sister’s head from her body? You think it was _comforting,_ feeling them around me and wondering when they would tighten?”

A shadow of something like discomfort crosses Hans’s face.

“Come now, Anna. I won’t deny there has been some… _unpleasantness_ between us, but until tonight, I’ve given you no cause to believe I would harm you.”

“Of course,” she sneers, “what could have given me _that_ idea? Maybe the fact that you _beheaded my sister_ —”

“What would you like to hear?” Hans interrupts, peevishly. “That I would never hurt you—or that I would? As our marriage should prove, I’m more that willing to play any part you choose—but make no mistake, Anna. You did choose.”

“No—I’ve had _enough_ of you telling me what I want to hear—”

“You’ll forgive me if I doubt that. You may not want to admit it, Anna, but there’s a remarkable overlap in our desires. Why else do you imagine you allowed me to playact the loving husband for an entire year, knowing what I’d done? You wanted to be cared for, and it suited me to oblige.”

“That—” Her hands are shaking. “That isn’t what happened.”

“Isn’t it? Are you sure?” Hans steps closer to her, seemingly unthinking, sword lowering. “There’s no shame in it, Anna; no shame in not fighting. Let me protect you instead. Do you truly find me such a terrible ruler? Such a terrible husband?”

Anna squeezes her eyes shut. “They—they’re the same thing to you, are they?”

“Of course not,” Hans says, soothing, and she opens her eyes to find him closer still, watching her with the same expression she’d once seen him use to calm Sitron, on that bitterly cold day last January, when the snow had turned into a blizzard and driven half the stables mad with terror. “But I could be both, if you’d let me.”

He’s so close now that he could reach out and touch her; cup her cheek the way he had on their wedding night, tenderly, when Anna had been crying fitfully and gripping at the sheets, and he’d eased the cotton from her fingers and drawn them up under her chin.

“It wouldn’t be real.”

“It could be,” Hans repeats, earnest, and she can’t tell, anymore, if it’s a lie or if he believes it; or if there’s really any distinction. “Allow me to end this, Anna, before it’s too late. _Please_. It’s gone on long enough already.”

She’s not sure what it is that does it—the way he says _please_ or the wide steady green of his gaze on her, entreating—but something in her breaks, at long last, and it is a floodgate opening. Unlike her near miss from earlier, this time, Anna both sees and feels it: the blade not sliding across skin so much as biting into it, lodging into the softness above Hans’s collarbone and tearing open when he flinches. She feels his body jerk against the blade all the way down to pommel; feels, or imagines she feels, the slight resistance of skin and clothing stretch and give as her weight drags the incision sideways, helplessly, towards the bone of his shoulder.

“ _Ahh_ —”

It could be the start of her name, or the start of a moan. But if Hans is the one wounded, she is the one who falls.

“Hans—Hans—Hans—“

Anna hears the voice before she realizes it’s her own.

“It’s alright,” Hans is saying, and her eyes refocus suddenly to find his face above hers, his fingers pressed against her temples. “I’m alright, Anna, calm down.”

The sword had made a terrible sound when she’d dropped it; enough to leave her head ringing, and Anna shakes her head as though to clear it, pushing against the cage of Hans’s fingers.

“I thought—I thought I’d killed you—“

He brushes a thumb across the ridge of her cheekbone, and it’s only when he replaces it, damp, by the hollow beneath her ear, that she realizes she’s crying.

“Killed me?” It’s very nearly a scoff, and her heart begins to lighten. Then the world suddenly rights itself and Anna finds that Hans is not above her so much as she is above him, sprawled against his chest and clinging onto the lapels of his dressing gown. “Don’t flatter yourself, Anna. You barely scratched me.”

Gingerly, he takes her fingers and unfolds them; guides them to his shoulder, to the wound she has only just noticed and now cannot tear her eyes from. The thing is raw and red and ugly, the first of its kind that Anna’s seen outside of a picture book—barring her sister’s bloodied stump, which she saw as though through water. This is different, and it first stuns and then sickens, to see how much human flesh, when parted, resembles meat from the butcher. Then her fingers touch the corner of the wound and Anna lets out a rush of air like the start of a sob.

“H-Hans…don’t—”

His blood feels warm beneath her fingers, thick and surprisingly sticky. “See?” he breathes, and she can feel his eyes on her, watching her closely. “See how pointless this is? How will you end this, Anna, when you can’t even stand to watch me bleed?”

“Hans,” Anna repeats, “ _please_ ,” and she’s sobbing in earnest now, the salt of it thick against her lips.

“ _There_ ,” Hans tells her, in answer, and his voice is warm and strangely pleased. The hand he’d left on her cheek slides around to the back of her head to draw her closer to him, and he holds her gently against his left shoulder, away from the bloody soak of his right sleeve. “There, you’ve repaid me in kind, a little, my dear. Did it make you feel better? Will you stop fighting me now, for a time, at least?”

“You murdered my sister,” she says, instinctively, but for once the phrase has no meaning, a collection of syllables that fall from her lips like a flinch.

“Others have done worse for a throne,” Hans answers, matter-of-factly. “But enough of the past, my dear. Why don’t we try returning to the present for a bit?”

He pushes bloody fingers through her hair, cupping her nape in a warm wet smear. Anna thinks of their wedding night again; of peppered kisses against her temple, his voice low and cherished in her ear.

“Well, Anna? What will it be? Are you with me, love?”

Despite everything, she is.

**Author's Note:**

>  _You have done harm/ others have done worse._ Deliver me; I’m sorry.


End file.
